BY ROSEMARY GOLDIE
Taken from the IMCS Newsletter ‘HABARI’, June 1990
One of the key leaders in the history of IMCS Pax Romana has been Rosemary Goldie of Australia. While studying in France in the years before World War II, Rosemary joined the Fédération Française de Étudiants Cathoiliques, the French movement of IMCS PAx Romana. During the war, Rosemary helped to start the first IMCSstudents federation in Australia. After the War, Rosemary wored in the international secretariat of IMCS Pax Romana and represented the movement at Vatican meetings on the laity. During the Second Vatican Council, Rosemary was one of the lay auditors and she later became the first lay woman to work in the Roman Curia.
INTRODUCTION
“This is not a history of Pas Romana. Others have written that and will write it again. It is not even the history of a period, but only “glimpses” of Pax Roamna as Ilived it between thirty and fifty years ago. Some of these are experiences shared by others, although the number grown fewer each year. Some are just memories I would like to share.
VADUZ 1938
The Interfedaral Assembly had been in session, 30th April to 1st May, in the Principality of Liechtenstein. The future Prince Franz-Josef II had met the delegates over a friendly meal. We were standing, Rudi Salat and myself, on the crisp snow that covered the street of the village capital. A peaceful spot in Central Europe, where war clouds were gathering rapidly. In a few months I would be returning to Australia; the Administrative Secretary was entrusting me with the task of taking the “message” of Pax Romana to the distant continent. Not too soon, for by the time the University Catholic Federation of Australia was founded in Sydney, all contact with the headquarters of Pax Romana in friborug had been cut off and would remain so for years. We affiliated through the Secretariat set up in Washington-headed by the “legendary” Ed Kirchner-after war had broken out in Europe, while delegates were gathered in Washington for the Pax Romana congress: the story has often been told. Rudi Salat, as a German, could not return to Europe and, when the U.S. came into the war after Pearl Harbour, he left for South America. There he helped to set up movements of university Catholic Action wherever a Nunciature could offer him hospitality.
How did I come to be in Vaduz? I had arrived in Paris in October 1936 on a scholarship (after a six-week journey from Sydney to London). A recommendation from a Jesuit in Sydney to an S.J. in Paris brought me to the Dominican, Fr. Marc Dubois, Chaplain to a little group of women students of the Sorbonne. I discovered that, as member of this group, “Veritas”, I was automatically member of the French Federation of Catholic Women Students, and thereby, member of Pax Romana – of which I had never heard. I was to hear much more of it, however, for the 16th Pax Romana Congress was to be help in Paris 28th July to 3rd August, 1937, on the occation of the International Exhibition. For the first time, too, the Congress was to be preceded by Study Days outside of Paris, at the College of Bouffémont. As Pax Romana’s first Australian, I was invited. For me, these were days dense with new experience.
In this hey-day of Pius XI’s “Catholic Action”, the study at Bouffémont was on the “Formation of the Students” in all its aspects-religious, philosophical, cultural, professional, social-and the task involved for Pax Romana. It was here, too, that Ihad may first taste of the “liturgical renewal”, with the experience of the “dialogue Mass.”
The Congress which followed in Paris, with about 700 participants, was all too relevant to present-day problems: the subject was “Unemployment among young university graduates.” The photos of Bouffémont and Vaduz, with the delegates grouped around the President, Max Legendre, are proof enough that the time was becoming ripe for Pax Romana, set up originally as a students movement, to “produce” a movement of professional people and “intellectuals” generally.
After the congress in Paris, I was so fully part of the Pax Romana family that, the following year, since no other woman students was available, I went to Liechtenstein as accredited delegate of the French Federation. (…)
THE WORLD SCENE
It is difficult to recapture today the “feeling” of immediate post-war Europe. Switzerland was something of an oasis of war-weary Europe; but the problems of the world pressed in on us from all sides. I had arrived from Australia among the ruins of London, and I spent all 1946 in Paris under wartime conditions where food and housing were concerned. After the war, Pax Romana’s budget was largely dependent on a grant from the American Catholic Relief Services. It was mad for refugee students and intellectuals, but half of it could be used for administrative purpose. This stopped abruptly after a few years, leaving the Secretariat in a state of trauma. But our problems were not only financial. The big menace was communism. At Anzio, debate was furious about relations with Marxist-inspired student organizations. “Peace” was an ambiguous team, appropriated by communist propaganda. The necessary “democratization” of University had ideological overtones: students claimed their rights as “young intellectual workers.”
There were hopes too, and new horizons. The ONU was getting under way. Before leaving Paris in 1946 I was part of the Pax Romana’s delegations to the first conference of UNESCO- we were received at the Nunciature by Mgr. Angelo Roncalli. The first stirrings of decolonization were already felt by the “colonial powers.” India was independent from 1947. The Pax Romana Jornal, which was revived in a multilingual form in 1947, carried feature articles on Human Rights, on UNESCO as seen by Jacques Maritain, on the movement from European unity in its various forms, on Christian Unity, on the international and supranational commitments of Catholics-in general and of Pax Romana in particular.
Pius XII, mostly through his Substitute, Mgr. Montini, was giving full encouragement to the international apostolate. The pre-war Conference of President (barely tolerated by ecclesiastical Authority) became in 1951 the Conference of Catholic international Organizations, with statutes approved by the Holy See and Permanent Secretariat. Pax Romana played an important part in this revival. It is hard today to realized that, before Vatican II, the Conference of I.C.O. was the only regular forum where world problems were discussed in all their amplitude as a challenge to the “apostolate”( today we would say “evangelization”).
The Holy Year 1950 was the first great coming together in Rome after the war of Catholic from all over the world. During that year, Pax Romana held its Congress in Amsterdam and received the famous Message from Pius XII: “Be everywhere present in the vanguard of the intellectual combat, at this time when the intellect is endeavouring to grasp the problems of humanity and of nature in the new dimensions they will have from now on.” The congress was followed by the Pilgrimage to Rome, where Mgr. Montini addressed the pilgrims at the Colosseum: “Faith is a strength, the only language which unites us.” The following year, Pax Romana gave its full collaboration to the First World congress for the Lay Apostolate, organized on the initiative of Vittorino Veronese, President of Italian Catholic Action and Vice-President of ICMIA.
THE UNIVERSITY APOSTOLATE
If world problems and the aftermath of war provide the context in which we lived, our day to day activity, apart from the Relief Service, was mainly concerned with the “University Apostolate”; and, after the division of Pax Romana, this meant specifically, for the IMCS, the student apostolate. Not only “Catholic Action” in the strict sense. Our vision of Pax Romana was wider, as sanctioned even by our statutes. The members of IMCS were national federations, recognized by the Hierarchy, “comprising Catholic university groups which give the student and integral formation and develop in him the apostolic spirit”; they must not be “active in party politics.” But there was no mention of any “mandate” from the Hierarchy, and no specific method of formation was prescribed. Developing the “apostolic spirit” was interpreted rather widely. Affiliated Federations included, together with Catholic Action groups, traditional organizations, more civic than apostolic in scope, from German-speaking countries, all-embracing associations of Catholic students like the Newman Clubs or societies of English-speaking universities, coordinations of various groups- professional, missionary, “apostolic”- like the French Federation of Catholic Students, Federations of students in exile, etc.
It was hoped that “Mutual fraternal understanding” would, by osmosis, bring a more apostolic spirit to the social minded Federations, while it was acknowledged that Catholic Action groups could profit from the secular and civic experience of the less “directly apostolic.” From Pax Romana, moreover, came the urging to develop the “social consciousness” of all students. The “politicization” of 1968 and after was in the far future.
The variety of Federations, linked in a wide-open student community, is evident in the news pages of the Pax Romana Journal, “A mariusque ad mare.” It is illustrated also in a series of booklets published up to 1951: on “Catholic Action” (Presented in much the same terms as the Vatican II Decree on the Lay Apostolate); on “Professional Economic and Social Sciences, Pharmacy, Art”; on the “Intellectual Apostolate” (proceedings of a Study Week held at Fatima in 1951); finally, “University for Christ, the University Apostolate in Action.” This last publication reflects the work of a Study Week on “University Catholic Action,” held at Mariastein, Switzerland, in January 1949-the meeting at which for the first time, it had been possible, in a spirit of reconciliation, to bring together German students and those of previously “occupied” countries. The groups presenting their activity in the booklet are from several European countries, but also from Brazil, Mexico, Paraquay and Peru, with “echoes” from Asutralia, India and South Africa. Much would seem remote to the successors of the student leaders of the 1940s and 1950s; but the need for solid Christian formation is something which is perhaps being rediscovered today in the search for “new” approaches to pastoral work and “evangelization” in the University. (…)
LOOKING BACK … AND FORWARD
After the itinerant World Congress of 1952 on “the Mission of the University” (Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Quebec), I left the staff of Pax Romana to work in Roman for the Permanent Committee for International Congresses of the Lay Apostolate (COPECIAL). I spent my last days in Fribourg, in September 1952, excavation in the archives of the years from 1919 (Pax Romana in preparation) to 1930 (when Rudi Salat came to the Secretariat and order began to reign); going through box after box stuffed, pell mell with material of more or less historical import.
Two “Pearls” surfaced. One, the circular dated 1921 which announced the definitive “solution” of Pax Romana’s financial problems! The other –history indeed-, in the last box, the hand-written letter in which Baron de Montenach recounted to Abbe Gremaud his “pilgrimage” through Europe, in the last years of the previous century, when he tried to bring Catholic students groups together in what was finally to become, in 1921, Pax Romana.
Contact with Pax Romana by no means ended with my departure for Rome. Many more “glimpses” would be possible. I would like to recall only three more activities, each on its way emblematic for the task, and growth, of Pax Romana.
Today the holding of an IMCS Seminar in Asia would be ordinary administration. It was a pioneering endeavour in 1954, a year before the Bandung Conference, at which the peoples of Asia and Africa were to affirm their place in the world for the first time. Thanks to the untiring efforts of Fr. Pierre Ceyrac, S.J., it was possible for the Seminar to bring together at Loyola College, Madras, from 10th December 1954 to 2nd January 1955, nearly 100 students from 12 countries. My own part, as informal Pax Romana agent, had begun some months earlier when I was traveling to prepare for the First Asian Meeting for the Lay Apostolate (Manila, 1955). In the Pax Journal for February 1954, I am reported as having come to Madras for preliminary planning, after taking part in the First African Leaders’ Meeting for Lay Aposolate, held in Uganda, where I had “worked fast and furiously establishing contacts for Pax Romana with African students and chaplains.”
Another pioneering activity of Pax Romana gave me my first ecumenical experience. In February 1955, a Conference on “University, Culture and human Community” was jointly organized by Pax Romana romana and the World Students Christian Fedration at the Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches (Bossey, Celigny, Switzerland).
The carefully worded letter in which the Bishop of Geneva, Lausanne and Fribourg, Mgr. Francois Charriere, General Chaplaine of Pax Romana, explained the nature and aims of this meeting to the Pro-Secretary of State, Mgr. Domenico Tardini, is proof enough of the novelty – potential risk – of such an undertaking at the time.
Finally, during the preparation of the Synod on Laity (twenty years after Vatican II), it seems appropriated to recall the “Fribourg Meeting” of July 1960. On the initiative of Ramon Sugranyes, then Presidents of ICMICA, an international group of 22 participants (4 priests, 3 women) met for the purpose of contributing to the work of the Council. Mgr. Charriere accepted to preside over the meeting. There was no set agenda. The subjects discussed included the status of laity in the church, Christian unity, Church/State relations, peace and the international community, the Church in the newly emerging nations. The findings, duly forwarded to Rome, may or may not have had an impact on the Preparatory commissions; the Meeting was in any case an expression of Pax Romana’s role in the church’s mission to a changing world. The world has indeed changed since then in many ways; the Church also, in its process of “aggiornamento.” Among the changes are new channels and means of expression for the contribution of those called to be in a special way the “thinking” faithful-mainly, but not exclusively, laity. There are not only Diocesan Synods, Pastoral Councils, National Commissions of all kinds; there are also Pontifical Councils for Laity, Family, Culture; Pontifical Commissions for Justice and Peace, Social Communications…
There remain, however, necessary tasks open to the free initiative of the “Christifideles.” Pax Romana –ICMICA has 40 years experience of taking “lay” initiative –not exclusive of clergy and not unblessed by Hierarchy. It has its place in this new context: a place wider than its structures, wide open to cultural change and exchange, but deeply based in the love of Christ, living in and through his Church for the world of today and tomorrow.”